It’s an annoying feeling when you get to the airport, ready to go off on your summer holiday, only to realise you’ve left your headphones at home. Yeah, I know, rookie mistake, it’s such an oversight, especially as I had a bit of a flight ahead of me. So, once we checked in and got through security and were sitting in the lounge, I headed to an InMotion store, and begrudgingly, spent £100 of my finest and hard-earned British pounds on a set of Sony WF-C710Ns. Why did I choose these though? Well, the price really. £100 seemed fair at the time, and I thought I could make some money back from YouTube by making this video and then selling the earbuds on eBay once I was done with them. Seemed logical. They also looked good, they were small enough to fit in a pocket, and in my experience, Sony has always made decent headphones in the past, though these are the earbud style, and they also had noise-cancelling technology because no one wants to listen to the drone of an aeroplane, and off I went. New earbuds in hand.
And I must say, for the week I spent in Cyprus on my holiday, they performed spectacularly for my needs. I’m a Spotify user, so yes, I know I’m not receiving the highest quality music, but lounging around by a pool, sitting in my room waiting for a certain someone to get ready before going to dinner, or sitting on the plane, they held their own. And with such a fantastic battery life, I only reached for the charger maybe twice throughout the trip, which I thought was absolutely fantastic.
In terms of sound quality, though again, I feel it was a £100 well spent because they’ve pretty much become my daily drivers, beating out my usual Creative Zen Air SXFI earbuds. And this really is down to such an amazing customisation through Sony’s Sound Connect app on my phone. I will say now, though, for such an in-depth app, the sign-up process is frustrating. You need a Sony account to unlock all the features, which I luckily had thanks to owning a PlayStation in the past. However, you’ve also got to give the app your precise location data so it can automatically adjust the equaliser and features based on your location. I guess if you’re in the centre of London, your music is going to sound a lot different to sitting in the Bodleian Library. I did not accept this, and I do not want Sony knowing exactly where I am all the time.
Running through the app, the main page gives your ambient sound control options, your equaliser and adaptive sound control toggles, which we’ll run through in two tics, your secondary simultaneously connected device controls and the music you’re listening to. Finally, your device settings. Right, diving first into the equaliser, there are a number of preset options to choose from, and two custom profiles, in which you can design your own EQ, or have your music do it for you using Sony’s ‘Find Your Equaliser’ option. Jumping across into the Adaptive Sound Control, this is where your headphones’ settings will change based on your location and surroundings. Your app can learn where you are, from your office, the street, the train, a shopping centre, wherever, and then tailor the settings based on what’s going on around you. For example, sitting at my desk, the app detected me in what it calls a ‘Staying position’ and made changes to my settings based on that position. I can also however, customise these ‘location-based settings’ to how I want the app to perform too. However, the caveat to all this is having your location permanently shared with Sony, and that’s not something I wanted to get into, so I have blocked this feature on my app.
Two more standout features I just wanted to mention is DSEE, which is a virtual enhancement technology from Sony, that upscales low-quality music into high-quality audio. and a 3D sound technology which, quite frankly, is a bit naff and I wouldn’t bother with it. It’s called 3D Reality Audio, and it’s supposed to portray the feeling of actually being in some kind of concert hall or live show, but it’s not great. Keep it switched off. It also requires you to download a few more apps to your device, and again, that’s really off-putting to me. I don’t like filling my phones with bloatware, and the headphones sound really good as they are, without the need for several more nonsense apps.
And as said, these headphones sound great. I’ve had to use a custom EQ to bring up some deep bass and keep the treble under control, but for the type of music I listen to, to give you an idea at the time of writing this review, I had quite a nice Bilmuri playlist on Spotify running, and the mix of highs and lows made the music sound really clean. I’ve had to lift the Clear Bass just slightly so those bass drum hits really thud through the music, but overall I really like the sound from these 710s. Oh, and just to say, pulling them out your ears auto-pauses your music. Great feature. Their frequency response ranges from 20Hz to 20,000Hz with 44.1kHz sampling. They’re closed back and have 5mm drivers. They’re IPX4 rated so they are waterproof and you’ve got around 12 hours of listening time in the earbuds.
The microphones for me were a bit of a mixed bag. While I received no complaints from anyone while talking to them on the phone, and someone actually told me I sounded quite clear, in my office here, which admittedly isn’t treated for audio, I felt the built-in microphones let these headphones down a bit compared to the audio picked up on my phone. Just take a listen to this.
So did I waste my £100? I don’t think so. They’re a very enjoyable set of earbuds. I did have to use the largest supplied earbuds, though for my ears to keep them in and sealed, but I don’t mind that. They sound good, look good, and have a lovely bunch of features to get stuck into. Just don’t turn on your permanent location data. These large companies are asking way too much from us at this point.
